Huckabee keeps digging

On Friday afternoon, while details of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School were still coming to light, Mike Huckabee appeared on Fox News to complain about school prayer. “We ask why there is violence in our schools but we have systematically removed God from our schools,” he said.

Upon further inspection, Huckabee’s unfortunate comments didn’t make any sense. But instead of backing off, the former Arkansas governor and failed presidential candidate managed to make matters slightly worse over the weekend.

Reflecting on Friday’s murders, the Fox News personality argued:

“Christian-owned businesses are told to surrender their values under the edict of government orders to provide tax-funded abortion pills. We carefully and intentionally stop saying things are sinful and we call them disorders. Sometimes, we even say they’re normal.

“And to get to where that we have to abandon bedrock moral truths, then we ask, ‘Well, where was God?’ And I respond that, as I see it, we’ve escorted Him right out of our culture and we’ve marched Him off the public square and then we express our surprise that a culture without Him actually reflects what it’s become.”

So long as Huckabee is going to keep spewing rhetoric like this, we might as well take the time to explain how foolish it is.

First, the government is not forcing businesses to provide “tax-funded abortion pills.” As Zack Beauchamp explained, “The Obamacare contraception mandate, which is what Huckabee is likely referring to, does not provide coverage for any abortifacients – and will actually help reduce abortion rates.”

Second, the notion that the United States has a godless culture and a public square devoid of religiosity makes me wonder what country Mike Huckabee lives in. As best as I can tell, in America’s public square, we have religious television stations, religious radio stations, religious athletes who pray on the field, religious entertainers who thank God at award ceremonies, religious public officials who emphasize their faith when seeking public office, religious book stores, religious holidays, religious movements, religious references on our currency, and pastors who get their own television shows on cable news networks.

And third, to reiterate a point from the weekend, the fact that Huckabee continues to want to push a bogus culture war in the wake of a national tragedy suggests he just isn’t an especially nice guy.

For a guy with a jovial reputation, there’s something rather disturbing about Mike Huckabee’s worldview. Remember, it was earlier this year when he said he wanted to see President Obama’s college transcripts “to show whether he got any loans as a foreign student.”

Last year, Huckabee falsely claimed President Obama “grew up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather.” Soon after, he endorsed “death panel” garbage. By the early summer, Huckabee was equating the national debt with the Nazi Holocaust.

In August 2009, Huckabee argued on his own radio show that Obama’s health care reform plan would have forced Ted Kennedy to commit suicide. Ed Kilgore argued at the time, “This despicable rant should disqualify Mike Huckabee from any further liberal sympathy, no matter how much he tries to joke or rock-n-roll his way back into mainstream acceptability.”